Monday Night Raw (5/1)

So good. So very good.

Surprisingly decent Raw this week, despite a lot of weirdness in storylines, feuds, and title picturåes.


How fuckingperfect was Alexa Bliss' opening promo last night? 99% perfect. Only thing is, she made a point of not being a queen, but a goddess. But goddesses don't get coronations. If she'd dropped an apotheosis in there it would have been 100% perfect for me and fuck the entire crowd that would have had to Google it. Plus it was just a smidge racist towards Nia Jax, which I hope was intentional.

The resulting tag match was really god for an "everyone i the pool" faces/heels tag mosh. Alexa pinned Bayley after raking her eyes, so I'm not sure where this is going except an Extreme Rules rematch.

It's the return of the Arbitrary Six-Man Cruiserweight Tag, with two feuds (Tozawa-Kendrick, Swann-Dar) and two randos (Gallagher and Nese) going at it because Raw is three hours long. Gallagher pins Kendrick, further cementing the time-filler status, but it was a decent enough match.

I'll give them some credit. As reasons for a  heel turn go, the crowd cheering the Hardy nostalgia act instead of their previous favorite Sheamus/Cesaro is a pretty good one. Cesaro wasn't wrong about the audience and their love for nostalgia acts and new arrivals, and a nugget of truth makes for a great promo.

Heath Slater, with Rhyno in his corner, wrestled Apollo Crews, with Titus "423-GET-TITUS" in his corner, in case you're wondinging if the Superstar Shakeup did anything to improve the Raw undercard situation.

The main event match was really good, but I couldn't enjoy it because I'd had the winner (Miz) and the means (Joe and Wyatt ference) spoiled for me beforehand. It was a triple-threat for the #1 contender for the US Title, so of course Miz won and of course time-killing feuds were set up for Rollins and Balor until Brock Lesnar gets back from petting mice too hard or whatever the fuck he does eleven months out of the  year. But still.

On the upside, it was set up by tons of entertaining crazy funny Dean Ambrose. He's like the last five years of Chris Jericho - you put up with him in the ring so  you can hear him talk. There's no excuse for that, of course, given Ambrose' youth and lack of a legendary in-ring career beforehand, but at least he can be entertaining at all.